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with me, correct me--but don't tell me to shut up. That's not the American way."

(Alternative title: Just Malin It In, which is both how I feel about this season and what Mr. Please Don't Take My Coaching Away did on his last HoH question. Most blatant competition throw since Dirtalie.)

Parts of the Internet suspect the rats made one last desperate attempt to intervene and save Janelle yesterday -- by putting all of Dan's alliances out in public. Right: all eighteen zillion of them. And how did they do that? They leaked at least part of his DR session over the cage's audio system. No word on just how much or what got out: the feeds were cut when Malin rushed to stop the broadcast. (Gawds only know what goes into his DR sessions. He may have realized immediately that as a rat tactic, it's one which leaves everyone vulnerable.)

So Dan may be in some degree of difficulty. It's not necessarily immediate and it obviously had no influence on the vote, but hamster reactions seem to indicate at least part of his dialog was significant. Hamsterwatch noted that the last time we had a DR public audio leak, it was also with Dan, in his original season -- and then went on strike. She feels, quite accurately, that this was a rat trick and they could have stopped it immediately for a wrong-button push. They wanted Dan to be heard, and so they made sure he was. Too much producer manipulation -- she needs a few days off.

They haven't all gone to bed yet, although they're turning in a little early for your typical hamsters.

...it still sounds like the primary target is Joe, but that's subject to change and being discussed in conversations which sometimes include Dan, so there's no guarantees here. (In private, Frank has talked about putting Dan on the block just to watch him sweat.) They're wondering if he'll even bother talking to them this week. Joe's sure talking to someone -- he's trying to get Jenn and Wil in on that still-popular game, It's All Janelle's Fault. You have to trust Joe and keep him in the house because Janelle lied to people and made them distrust Joe! Can't everyone see how that works!

No?

Well, get used to it, because it's going to keep moving for a while. Ashley's still bashing her: how could you not hug me on the way out just because I betrayed you? Jenn called her the worst person (and coach) in the house: so self-centered. Malin is going off every ten minutes, concentrated on how now someone else gets the jury prize. Also that Janelle's fans are insane and firebombing their homes. The outside audience wasn't cheering that loudly for Janelle: the rats just left one door open, or brought in extra people, or both. And do you have to ask about Danielle? The horse is dead and people are buying tickets to keep beating it. They're gloating about how much the 8-1 vote must have hurt her. It's the No Jury Payback Vote, and nothing's riding in because the horse is dead -- unless Revive-A-Hamster enters the already-crowded schedule. Watch to see if Janelle pops up on the Internet over the next few days: any indication of sequester is another rat move.

...Shane told Joe that he'll be targeted because he was Janelle's puppet. (See? Still moving.) Also to keep his voice down. Guess how well either one worked.

...lots of discussion on who to put up against Joe: popular choices are Wil or Shane. They think they can get Shane to volunteer, and Frank is wondering if they can stage a fight for the cage's benefit. Sure, rely on Shane's acting skills. Harrison wouldn't.

...Frank had his HoH reveal and had to do it in the unitard. (He's not allowed to remove it until sometime today.) Letter from his grandmother, distributed his goodie basket to pretty much the entire cage -- and then it seems to have ended very quickly.

(He said the DR tried to talk him into claiming he's this year's All-Star. Again, that got through. Fishes are being invoked for everything but what we need to hear.)

...in the trivia department, Dan told the world that at the end of the game, the show went through his bags and took stuff back -- nearly everything given out to him in the cage was confiscated. Yes, the show is that cheap. (Wonder what happened to those clothing gifts in prior seasons? Go ahead and call bingo.) He did have the option to generously keep one piece. And as long as he was talking, he revealed that Danielle went insecure on him whenever he tried to talk with Kara without her there.

Nothing's definite yet and this is a cast that has trouble keeping their own names straight for five seconds in a row, but the idea of getting Dan up and out has some momentum to it. We'll see if it survives the Mist.

Not much going on before the feeds went to fish, except that Will seems to be talking himself onto the block -- he won't lie up a false promise, also known as The Janelle Road, and that's offending the HoH of the day (Malin) -- plus no one knows what the rats are going to do about Ashley. Her back is giving her major problems today, and playing in anything physical might be completely out. Do they forfeit her food standing and stick her with the Have-Nots -- potentially making her back worse with that horrible 'bed' -- or hand her a medical pass for the week?

"They leaked at least part of his DR session over the cage's audio system."

Wow! Talk about interference! I don't know how their audio system is set up but you'd think that there isn't a direct switch connecting the DR microphone to the House speakers. Someone had to make the connection between the rats' speakers listiening to the DR and the microphone that goes out to the house.

Why would they want to throw Dan under the bus? Are they that much in love with Frank and Malin?

Read between the lines there and you might find the Hantz Perspective: Good Is Boring. (Or perceived good: Dan's no saint.) They may be hoping people watch for the eventual dethroning of the villain more than the repeat triumph of the one who rode off into the sunset once before. And they're forgetting how well that didn't work for MB: Jeff may have fallen in love, but much of the audience fell in loathe instead. Their ratings are shaky enough as-is.

But if that's what they decided to go with -- well, they knew how well-entrenched Dan was with the help of his forty-eight trillion alliances and that all-concealing Mist. And since most of these hamsters seem to be too stupid to fall for DR manipulation, the rats manipulated the DR itself.

Yeah, the Chenbot seems enamored with Boogie: "Brilliant, clever, the new Will..." OK, the way he cornered Janelle was good but the thing is; Janelle has always been overrated as a player. She's very entertaining and good in the BB-type competitions but she got played in both her previous seasons. Maggie and Will both outwitted her badly so Malin just followed suit.

And, speaking of Russell, you are only partially right when you say: "the audience fell in loathe instead". Most of us did hate the creep but a whole new segment of viewers emerged and did fall in love with him. Fan Favorite twice. Sickening but true.

Shane, Joe, Danielle, and Britney are Have-Nots. Definitely a team event. Sounds like teams were randomly assigned by colored bandanas and Ian took the one that let him be on Dan's team -- Danielle is claiming he grabbed it right out of her hands. And possibly shoved her into a coffee table at some point. So guess how many retells we're going to get on that one? I give it six before Ian pulled a gun and took her hostage for three months, which is about a ninetieth long it'll take Danielle to convince herself she needs to press attempted murder charges.

And I'll just leave her to twist that for a while.

ETA: Okay, sounds like it was a rehash competition: wear lemon costumes, soak up juice, get it squeezed out. (Ow. Well, at least Keith is long-tone.) It also seems Wil mouthed off during it, basically saying that Malin won't let Frank speak for himself when Malin challenged him during the competition. Since Malin cannot take an insult (although he can take your money), the new-probably-temporary-shift is to use Joe as a pawn and try to get Wil out. Dan has been forgotten, at least for the usual five seconds.

Wil and Joe. (This is despite Shane's best efforts: he kept trying to volunteer for pawn duty.) Wil may be the primary. Or this could be the setup to backdoor Dan, whom Frank is very nervous about giving more time to. Joe at least seems to have been told he's safe, but guess how much anyone's going to believe that.

Although Denhart's a jerk and I think his site is mostly worthless, you have to enjoy seeing a producer fight so hard to preserve his reputation! He's practically threatening a lawsuit and the message is clear: "If you want to have access to the players for interviews on your site then shut up."

So, it seems that only Joe, Ian, Frank and Boogie heard Dan talking about one of his alliances, the one with Frank and Boogie. If that is the case then the rats wanted to make sure Joe left. Frank and Boogie didn't learn anything about Dan if that is the only thing they heard, Ian won't do anything about it but now they have to get rid of Joe who "knows too much."

If that is the result of this then I have no problem with it! It's a dumb thing to do though because now everyone will be guarded during their confessionals.

Don't forget the other part of the equation: limited camera displays + lots of fish. Those are the only reactions anyone saw, and the feeds keep cutting out whenever a hamster tries to talk about what was overheard.

In addition to Shane with his useless Veto ticket, we have Jenn, Malin, and Ashley -- the last because Joe drew the Hamster's Choice ball and picked her. Which means that in anything physical, the competition is effectively back down to six: she's not even remotely moving well. Kind of begs the question of whether Joe took her so as to have one less person to worry about or because he was hoping she'd aggravate her injury so badly as to create a medical removal from the house and give him a free week. You may not have noticed, but Joe is something of a jerk.

Lots of speculation about upcoming Week In An Hour editions from Not-Team Malin. They want to get rid of Joe and Wil as a one-two punch. Maybe they should try getting them to punch each other.

If that's what Joe was thinking he kind of overthought his game a little bit, because he has forgotten that BB A) will need 1 or 2 double elim weeks anyway to get down to a normal length season, and B) would continue with the existing nominees anyway and just cut out a double elim week with this many players left. So Joe would still be on the block anyway and his nasty little game wouldn't work.

And now the week becomes boring. Malin has proposed that by not using it, they gain enough trust not to go up next week. (Yeah, right.) Frank wants a Pandora's Box that allows him to put a third person on the block. (Uh-huh.) Shane thinks he's going to be backdoored. (As if.) And the Zingbot showed up -- but all anyone saw on the feeds was the entrance before the fish showed up and settled in for a long stay. The hamsters have reviewed a couple of the zings. Ashley was told the only thing bright about her was her smile -- and didn't get it. Danielle, however, got hers -- and was offended. Majorly. She was told Shane was getting her a gift after the show: a restraining order. This did not penetrate to the realization of 'I am an obsessive who is chasing a target that doesn't want to be hit'. It just made her think she's being edited as a stalker. This meant a lot of DR complaining. (A brief audio leak reached the feeds, but not the house.) And cage complaining. And just plain complaining.

We've heard (and heard, and heard) the stories she tells in the cage and seen how she repeatedly distorts virtually anything said to her. And a lot of the time, that's just a typical day in the life of a hamster. But here we have an associate with an ax to grind, and she's claiming what we're seeing isn't just contestant antics.

Again: ax to grind. People rarely turn up like this to sing praises, and some have been known to seize bashing opportunities when there's no way for their target to strike back -- or even know anything's wrong. But a number of things have felt somewhat off with Danielle for a while now.

This isn't necessarily accurate. But it's food for thought.

Paraphrasing a tweet I saw on Hamsterwatch (and can't remember whom to credit): you think you've gone through the entire house of crazy and find a parking garage full of insanity underneath.

If all that has any basis in truth, then I'm wondering what Danielle's version of late night trysts with Shane will be. Will it even occur to her that every moment in the house (outside the toilet and shower) is on tape?

Wil has realized that he took great delight in ousting someone who wasn't going to put him on the block. That's right: he figured out Janelle was with him all along and he gleefully kicked his best-and-only true ally out of the cage. In other words, what's happening to him now is His Own Damn Fault.

Give him credit. There aren't a lot of hamsters who've ever figured that out.

In other not-news...

...Hamsterwatch ended the strike after making it at least sort of threaten to trend on Twitter. Lots of retweets, lots of angry feedsters -- it's believed that Endemol at least knows who they're going to ignore now.

...Frank waffled about using the veto and backdooring Dan -- but Ian has been scrambling to save Everyone's Ally and may have even talked Frank out of going with it, convincing him that he doesn't need any more enemies right now. And why would Ian do that? Because Dan is aligned with him. Along with everyone else. Of course, what Frank actually winds up doing will be what Malin wants done, so Ian can save the back pats for roughly forever. We'll see what happens later today.

...speaking of Dan, he and Malin ran a brief con on the cage. Malin brought a banana suit in his luggage. Why? So someone could wear it and pretend America's Player or Pandora was on. (It didn't last long.) He was also involved in a Bible discussion where Joe almost accused Noah of being on acid. Hamsterwatch claims it was a lot of fun in the right light, but Jokers didn't get transcripts. Sacrilegious!

...Danielle has managed to put a (temporary) clamp on her Shane-pursuits: the Zingbot still has her very much freaked out over her edit. If this is compulsive behavior, she won't be able to keep it up for long. Stay tuned.

...Jenn revealed that the DR has been giving her lines to say in confessional. And she's been flubbing them. And that sent everything to fish.

...Joe has been Going To The Jack Shack in the Have-Not room. While Britney was also in there. Britney described the experience. (Not PG-13, not safe for most workplaces, fairly blatant, approach at your own risk, any mental images you get of Joe here are not my fault.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPE3Y3OAnM4

We also have stories from her sorority sisters about her having failed the nursing exam (possibly passed later -- but right now, Alabama has her registered as an LPN) and one from the claimed ex-boyfriend Trey who claims he never dated her, but she kept sending him flowers.

No one knows why it was triggered, who it applies to, or what it really means. But the cage has been notified that they are on it. Maybe there's been just a little too much singing.

For some reason, they're no longer allowed to mention the Zingbot's visit on the feeds -- yeah, like Endemol really thinks they can save the surprise -- much less what happened to the Zingbot during that visit. However, Britney managed to not exactly sneak it in during an all-targets sex talk.

Shane: "Have you guys ever passed out under the covers going down on a girl because it's too hot in there?"

Britney: "They call that the Zingbot 3000."

After you recover from considering what an interesting life sometimes-virgin Shane leads (and dear gawds, who has he been dating and does she boil water at a touch? Thin cotton sheets and come up for air. Well, here's a man who's no threat for endurance contests...), you'll spot it: the Zingbot passed out. It's been very hot in the cage's area over the last few days, occasionally going triple digits in the afternoons. Figure in the sweatbox nature of that costume and a full-scale faint was inevitable -- and will probably never make the air.

Really not much going on right now. Dan made the mistake of seeing how Danielle was doing and found out that she's married, no she was married and it was horrible just like everything else in her life, actually she was engaged and living with the guy so it was just like marriage, and she used her money to pay off all his credit cards and his debt was rung up from spending on other girls and did you know she has IBS (and became irritated when Britney explained what that was) and spastic colon and dear gawds will someone just stuff a gag in her mouth already? Dan, to his credit, lived through this. Britney, who gets the retells (including Danielle's version of the Bible Hour), is having progressively more trouble. And Danielle wrapped it all up by saying the feedsters know the truth.

And Danielle wrapped it all up by saying the feedsters know the truth. Which some of them do. And everything she's saying isn't it.

Not since Kid Nation's Taylor have I felt a reality contestant should, for their own good, just stay at the filming site and NOT return to reality. She makes it worse for herself every time her mouth opens.

What I find most interesting, overall, is that BB contestants while acknowledging that there is a large community of people watching their every move, fail to stop themselves from proverbially "picking their nose" in front of millions.

My current guess is that Danielle thought of this as getting a new, very large audience for her stories -- and never considered that any of the previous show attendees would ever appear to compare notes.

Taylor at least had the excuse of 'I'm, like, nine.' Danielle? Maybe emotionally, but the birth certificate isn't going to back her up. Stay in the cage? Maybe until the heat dies down. Anything beyond that and she'll be next year's mentor.

At this point, you can pretty much consider Wil to have laid down and died. This may explain why the ants are swarming worse than ever: they have a rotting corpse to work on. So while Joe is still running around trying to make sure he's safe because he's such a tremendous game threat, Wil has gone into 'I committed game suicide and dead players don't move' mode.

Ashley had another date -- this time with Frank. Making out ensued: emotional connections did not. (By the way, it now looks as if Ashley is the third recruit from a dating show's casting discard pile. Think about this: we are getting things Harrison rejected.) Ian's reaction was 'Meh': he's pretty much over the whole thing and is getting tired of the DR asking him his opinions about what the females are wearing today. Not hard to spot the character role they want him occupying, and he's not happy with it. Some of that came out during his turn to babysit Danielle -- she was trying to review for any 'Who does America think' competition by going over questions where she wanted to be the answer. Ian told her America wanted to see someone else in a bikini, would think other people were smarter, and so on down the line. She never caught on.

Danielle told still more stories, and some of the same stories, and found a new target: Jenn -- who put up with it until she couldn't any more and walked out. This is not a solo incident: people are getting a little tired of the routines, and Britney's becoming just as exhausted from the constant supervision as Dan is. Go ahead and haul to F2 -- if you can stand being in the cage with her that long.

The feeds continue to flash to fish for anything and nearly everything. And the fish? Are dying. Excessive camera exposure may be fatal.

On pain of DR-ordered death, Ian and Ashley were production-forced to have a second date last night. It didn't go well. And then Ian was hamster-forced by every female in the cage to go through torture, also known as 'They decided to get rid of some of his body hair'. Only ninety percent or so, and only in the most painful and amusing way possible. Okay, Jenn stayed out of it, and he did what he did for most of his agonies: volunteer -- but they took great pleasure in every scream they invoked. Hello, payback.

Why are the rats desperate for another storyline? Because Danielle, who is now also a bullying victim -- every time the rats tell her to do something, she now considers it as bullying -- no, seriously -- has finally been making noises about dumping I-Can-Play-For-Myself Shane. The Zingbot effectively derailed her entire life, and since Shane and the romance were her life-lie for the season, production needs a backup plan. Ian and Ashley? Get to be it. Except that they're tired of each other.

Maybe if they'd recruited Ian off Average Joe instead of bringing in an applicant.

Or maybe if I'd applied and gotten on they might have had a showmance between me and Ian. I can get along with smart guys and I have Asperger's Syndrome, so maybe Ian and I could get along pretty well.

The rats are screwed like a cheap hooker. They were banking on Janelle staying in most of the way to the end, but the HG caught on to her and booted her the hell out. The rats probably would have liked for Kara and Jodi to both stay a while, but that didn't happen. They want a showmance no doubt, but their stupid-a$$ed Zingbot ruined the best shot at one they had. Now they're fighting like a cornered animal to keep the rest of the coaches in the house, because their precious ratings will take another one right in the shorts every time they lose one. The feedsters will have record amounts of fish time inflicted on them the rest of this season, and the ratings loss we're likely to see couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of rats.

To be fair, Shane's done a little of it to himself -- on the game level. Britney in particular is freaked out over the seeming fact that Shane can't keep his mouth shut: he blabs ideas, suggestions, and unnecessary details all over the place, possibly just to get a conversation in.

(BTW, as a house flipper, he very much svcks. He told Brittany he's making $26k a year right now: deliveries and personal training for one client, frequently with seven-day work weeks involved. He seemed amazed that she makes more than that. Oh, and he signed Power Of Attorney over to his house flipping partner, so let's hope he's better at reading people outside the cage than in.)

So what's the latest result from Shane's loose-but-never-kissing lips? He told Joe some things. Possibly just about everything. To the point where Britney & Danielle are now wondering if there's any way to get rid of Joe today, because Joe has even less sense of confidentiality than Shane and will shout every last detail to the HoH Of The Week. What an exciting prospect for both of them. And it's going to be both of them for a while now, because all of Britney's babysitting seems to have led into Danielle attaching herself to a new partner.

Where's Dan in all this? Currently walking down Memory Lane with Malin: he can get Danielle back later with a sentence and a little mist. Irish for preference. Dan and Malin are beginning to recognize that they're each other's best shot against the 'But that one already won' argument. Fear.

So we're at the point where everyone realizes the only thing Shane can do is competitions -- and not all of them. For the social game, he may be more of a horror show than Rachel: maybe he's not running around making enemies every three seconds, but forming too many friends isn't exactly the workable opposite. He's reached a level where Malin wants to keep him around for a little while just to get the heat off whoever he's with for the next two seconds -- how low do you have to go for that? Shane's a disaster area. Imagine how well he would have done on the show he actually went out for.

...yeah, probably would have won.

BTW, we also got this from the lead audio rat:

"I recognize that English can be a difficult language to comprehend, but stop still means stop. Please. Stop. Singing."

Y'know, if he hadn't used 'comprehend', he wouldn't have lost half of them.

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